Posts Tagged ‘Jilly Goolden’

Find Wine will very shortly be launching the chance to win Our Ultimate Dinner Guest!

It was a few months ago now that we sat down and came up with the idea for The Ultimate Dinner Guest. We thought it would be a great way to get a bunch of people, some of which may never have tried our wine round a table, trying our wine with suitable food. We thought, this would be even better if we could supply someone fun and engaging to teach the assembled party a little about what they were drinking and be entertaining too.

The big question was, who on earth would be a suitable Ultimate Dinner Guest?! They must be, entertaining, erudite, interested in food and wine, someone our customers would want in their houses and of course they would have to have the X- factor!

Therefore this summer I was given the difficult task of finding the Ultimate Dinner Guest. It was a journey that took me from New York to Cape Town, from Hong Kong to Cuba and from Fulham to Chelsea, via some/many pubs!

I was sure that at some point in my life I have been asked, “which 5 people would you most like to have supper with?” So that was the list I started with. P.G. Wodehouse, Harry Flashman, Billy Connelly, Scarlett Johanssen and Stephen Fry. Now considering that Mr. Wodehouse is sadly no longer with us, that ruled him out. Plus, as much as I would love Flashy to be there, he is regrettably fictional (although I do know people who would think they are him!) so that left me with only 3 people. I needed more so I emailed a bunch of friends and asked who they would put on their list, the most popular people were, Nelson Mandela, Jeremy Clarkson, David Gandy (apparently a male model), Jessica Alba (plus a long list of very attractive women) and bizarrely Bill Gates.

There was nothing else to do but to go and meet everyone on my list and have dinner with them to see whether they would be suitable for the job.

First up was Nelson. I could very easily dedicate an entire post to this dinner, it was fascinating and hugely enjoyable. He even offered to fly the winners out to South Africa to dine with him. However there was one downside…Nelson doesn’t know anything about wine, I mean it was embarrassing. He said to the sommelier, he didn’t like Chardonnay then proceeded to order Chablis. He thought Shiraz was a character in Star Wars and Falanghina was something unrepeatable! So that was him out of the question entirely.

So onto my next candidate or should i say candidates, Scarlett Johanssen and Jessica Alba. I only had limited time free this summer and so thought I would kill two birds with one stone because I only had chance for 1 LA trip. The two girls were fantastic company, everything you would hope two young Hollywood starlets to be. Plus the food we ate in a small place called Cube was sensational but the highlight was the pudding!! It was Chocolate sauce with what can only be described as a threesome ( if my business ever goes under the photos and video will certainly pay off any debts!). We eventually got round to talking about the competition prize over breakfast the next morning and they were both ever so keen.

However on my second day in LA, whilst shopping I bumped into a very sweet young Brazilian girl, I think her name Giesele or something like that…what can I say, it was love at first sight. What I didn’t realise however was that Jessica and Scarlett were following me and saw me kissing the Brazilian. Despite my pleas that it I was in love, it was too late, they went completely off the idea of being the main prize in my competition!

I was beginning to panic that we would have no Ultimate Dinner Guest and we might have to resort to ringing Jilly Goolden.